dulce est desipere in loco
by cleromancy
Summary: Mizael learns the hard way that pride goes before a fall. Vector finds all this hilarious.


i was ordered to atone for my last fic with misery porn so here it is

* * *

So, okay, maybe they haven't seen Mizael in over a week. Vector wasn't too fussed about it, to tell the truth. But of all the Barians, it was the least like Mizael to go out of contact for very long or to enjoy spending time in the human world, so eventually, Durbe got very concerned, and told them all to go out looking for him.

And wouldn't you know it, Vector only meant to pretend as though he put in a great deal of effort to find him, but as it turns out, he has actually managed to stumble upon their erstwhile companion, in a forest outside a mountainous valley. Vector doesn't even know where they are, overall, in the human world—that's how little effort he'd been making.

"Stumble upon" was almost literal—Mizael is lying on the ground, clothing torn and scratched, one arm crumpled beneath him and the other lying out in front of him, bloodied. It looks as though he'd been torn apart by wolves, except that for the most part, his skin is healed and his bruising looks old. So overall, Mizael looks like he's in pretty bad shape—in fact, Vector had thought he wasn't breathing until he approached and put his ear to Mizael's chest and heard a sudden rattle in his throat and a muttered, "G'off me..."

"Woooow," Vector says, drawing the word out. "I'm really impressed, Mizael. You look like you actually did something interesting for once." He notes the torn fabric, his dry, cracked lips, the bags beneath Mizael's eyes. "How long have you been like this? Did you go to a party last night?"

"Not... sure," Mizael rasps.

"Must have been some party then." Vector giggles. Mizael fixes him with a shadow of his usual baleful stare.

"I got attacked by some wild animals after dark. I was looking for... the legendary Numbers in the area. I used too much energy fighting them off, and one of them..." Mizael twitches the fingers on his right arm. "Shattered my Lapis. Couldn't get home. Couldn't Bariarphose. Fought them off, but... injuries..."

"And you couldn't call for help?"

Mizael's eyelids flutter. "After a few days, I'd used... so much light... just to heal my wounds, I... couldn't manage it. I was so weak..."

Vector crosses his arms. "So, let me get this straight. You were mortally injured... and instead of calling Durbe for help immediately, you tried to heal yourself first, and exhausted yourself to the point of death _anyway_?" Oh, this is rich! Mizael, the proudest of them all, undone by his silly self-righteous dignity! Vector can't handle it; he laughs, and laughs, near doubled over at one point. Mizael glares faintly the whole time, although it has hardly any power.

"I still can't believe I spent three months in this world with no problem, and you managed to exhaust and nearly kill yourself in a matter of days," Vector says, still chuckling every few syllables. "Aren't you the one who lost our first Sphere Field Cube? –You didn't even lose the duel, you just blew it up!"

"Are you...done...?" Mizael grunts. Even though he's managed to heal his wounds, his eyes are distant, like he is in pain or exhausted or both. To be honest, Vector's not sure how much time Mizael actually has.

"So, want me to bring you home? Then again, you might not survive the trip this weak," Vector muses, tapping his lips with his fingertips. "We could take the chance. I'm sure you wouldn't break up into little bits in the transfer stream. Heh!"

"I can bring... myself home..." Mizael mumbles.

"Ooooh, right, of course," Vector drawls. He turns around—"In thaaat case, I'll just let you get home on your own time! Didn't realize how much fun you were having here. Well, I'll see you later then!" He doesn't make it one step away before Mizael is groaning for him to come back, wait, he can't get home or he'd have done it, obviously. "Well, I could go back and call for Durbe and the others to come help you out..." Vector says, walking around Mizael's prone body like he is appraising it.

Mizael's eyes widen and plead. "Not... everyone..." he rasps, "not... necessary..." Of course, that would shame him far too much, for everyone to see his condition.

"I think there's only one thing left to do," Vector says, snapping his fingers. "I'll give you energy, you go home, I go home, I make fun of you for the next several weeks, and everyone wins!" Mizael nearly goes into a coughing fit. What Vector is proposing isn't unheard of. Direct transference. Home, it would be something they did gem-to-gem, heart-to-heart.

It's actually very unpleasantly intimate. Vector never does it. But the opportunity to have something to hold over Mizael's head is worth it. "It's this or I go get Durbe," Vector says slyly. Mizael shakes his head, side to side. That looks difficult to manage with his face nearly pressed into the ground, so Vector can only assume he's serious.

Vector finally reaches into his jacket and pulls out a red chip of Baria Lapis the size of a marble. After considering for a second, he also pulls the jacket off. He likes it, it's good quality leather; be a shame to tear it mid-transformation. "Here, you can have that," he says, tossing it jovially over Mizael's prone body as if throwing him a blanket.

A flash of light, a crackling in the air—Vector blazes inside and it rushes outward—the skin at his back prickles and then pain sears through it as his wings burst out, obsidian-edged—his crystal heart burns in his chest and pushes diamond outwards, trading matter for matter, water for fire, earth for air, bones for crystal and skin for chitin and when it hardens he is in Barian form, flexing his fingers.

(He rarely takes his true form in the human world, mostly because his purposes here are sneaky and underhanded and best accomplished by keeping a low profile. Also because maintaining Barian form in the human world is tiring, without a Sphere Field or some other source of power. But on the occasions when he can, it's so freeing—to be liberated from heavy limbs and wet rattling organs always moving against each other, the slow mechanical production of speech-sounds, all of the nasty parts of being human.)

"You know, it only just occurred to me," he says, cocking a head to the side, his voice making the air buzz. "No one's ever tried direct transference between Barian form and human form, have they?"

Speech is too much for Mizael by now, but he makes a low, gurgling moan of aggravation that conveys his thoughts on the matter pretty well. Vector snickers. "Well, I'm sure it will be fine. This is an emergency procedure, after all. We'll just have to hope for the best. And we know I _always_ mean the best."

He flexes his fingers again and a glowing ball of red light forms between them, throwing eerie vermilion highlights into Mizael's hair and across his face. Vector kneels down and presses the light against Mizael's chest, where his Lapis normally would be.

—inside Mizael he can sense his light, a tiny little citrine flame that would normally be a hot shining star, burning low and barely smoldering, and Vector fans it with his own scarlet blaze. Were they home, both in their true forms, they would do this gem-to-gem and blend their lights harmoniously, reflect it back and forth until it blazed brighter than the both of them—but they aren't back home and Vector doesn't know what it would do to Mizael's human form if he were to try and do it properly, feed him light slowly until he can refract it as his own—

so Vector just pulses energy into him, not recklessly, but not particularly cautiously, either. The important thing is to give Mizael enough to get home on, and then he can rest, and "metabolize" it properly, come back into balance. Durbe will probably give him a private lecture and Vector will have something to laugh about for the rest of the year.

Mizael's eyes snapped open the moment Vector made contact, and his breathing has alternately sped up and slowed several times during the process. Vector pushes a little more into him until he feels Mizael's light catch on his a little bit, feed into it, begin to grow and push against his own energy a little more tenaciously, and only when he senses that Mizael's light is no longer in danger of burning out does he remove his hand and step back.

Mizael lies there, his eyelids flickering, and then they slip shut, and he attempts to stand up. "All~ better~ now~" Vector singsongs, clapping his hands together. "Time to go home and take a nap, little fuckup dragon-user. And don't ever make us worry like that again, young man!"

—Whoa, except actually, Mizael still isn't standing very steadily at all. He looks like a stiff breeze would blow him over. "You sure you fixed your legs alright?" Vector asks. "If you need to wait until your body recovers even more to go home, I'm definitely not waiting around fo—"

Mizael suddenly staggers against Vector—Vector wasn't expecting this, so he falls backwards and lands on his rear with a "guh!" and Mizael slumps against him, sprawled out with his legs behind him. "Nnn..." he groans—Vector notices that his eyes are dilated so wide that, despite that Mizael's eye color is normally a pale river-blue, they appear near-black. His breathing is deep, like a sleeper, not shallow as though he is in pain.

Uh-oh. Vector's starting to think that maybe he didn't account for how low Mizael's light had actually burned—after all, Barian energy has all kinds of weird effects on human bodies, and if Mizael couldn't shrug Vector's off or absorb it correctly, who knows what it's doing to his squishy human brain? (The effects wouldn't be permanent—he'd be completely normal if he just phase-shifted back to his proper Barian body—but then again this could be particularly obnoxious if Vector has to put that much more work into dragging the priss home.)

"Do I have to call for backup, you useless lug?" Vector sighs, moving to push Mizael's head off his chest so that he can stand up and drag him home if he has to. This has become such a pain. Durbe's always accusing Vector of causing trouble, and yet, look at his favorite lieutenant! At least Vector gets things _done_...

Except, when Vector put his hand against Mizael's head to push it away, Mizael had turned his face into it, rubbing his cheek against Vector's palm and nearly... crooning? He's still doing it, in fact. "Mmm," he says, "you're so warm..."

Uh. Well. This is new. "You feeling okay, there, Mizael? You've probably got enough juice to get home now," Vector says, cautiously, watching him.

"Mmnnn..." Mizael hums again, and then starts giggling. "I'm so shiny," he says, giggling like a schoolgirl. "I can feel it all... in me... so much..."

This... is _hilarious_! It takes everything Vector has in him not to start laughing until he throws up. He gave Mizael too much light, and it fired off too many signals in his sparky little wet human brain—after all, he's figured out how to control real humans with Barian light, it penetrates right down into them past all that nonsense junk like relationships and higher processes and identity—but he had no idea that just flooding Mizael with whatever he could give him might do something funny if he wasn't prepared to absorb it. The fact that Vector has only now found this out instead of sooner is a crying shame. "Really?" he says, in a tell-me-more tone. "What can you feel, Mizael?"

"Oh," Mizael says, his unfocused eyes roving around vaguely, "your light... it's so different, it's so strong... it's hot and I want to..." Talking about it seems to give him energy; he props himself up a little. Even though he's normally taller than Vector, most of him is splayed out on the ground so that his head is just level with Vector's shoulder as Vector sits upright. "I want more..." he says, his eyes pleading. Dilated, excited. "I want more of you..."

"Miza-chan is kind of cute like this," Vector hums. His wings are only just counterbalancing them, with Mizael leaning so hard on him. "What do you want, Mizael? Tell me again?"

"I want your light," Mizael moans, "I want it, I want to shine for you," pressing against Vector, he presses his lips to the borders of Vector's skin at the nape of his neck, where the obsidian of his wings and back plating begins. Vector even shivers a little—Mizael kisses up it, in little, gentle pecks over and over, birdlike little kisses until he reaches up behind Vector's ear. "You gave me so much," he says, almost a whine, "so much, so more... more..."

(Of course, Vector can't give Mizael any more light than he already has—he'd explode. Not that that wouldn't be fun to watch. But Vector would get it from Durbe later—he's already injured enough of their comrades.)

"Do you want more?" he asks, egging Mizael on. He presses his hand to Mizael's back. "Do you want me inside yo-ou—" oh no, he lost it there, laughing like an idiot, his whole body shaking with laughter to strong that it's bouncing Mizael up and down.

"Don't la-augh," whines Mizael, who is now attempting to kiss Vector on the face, his lips sliding over the smooth plating where a mouth would have been if Vector were in human form. His feathery hair brushes over Vector's shoulders.

"Then take it," Vector says. When Mizael looks confused, Vector shifts, rolls his chest out farther so that his gem touches Mizael's chest. Mizael gasps. "Go ahead."

"Ah!" Mizael scoots down a little, presses his fingers to Vector's gem. Ah... Vector might genuinely enjoy this part. (If he had been in human form this whole time, by now seeing Mizael, high-and-mighty Mizael so eager, so stripped down to basic hungers, would have him nearly as out of his own mind. Vector's spent enough time in his human body to know what it would do even when he's out of it.) "Oh, there you are," Mizael croons, rubbing his fingers against Vector's gem, which slowly gleams with light again.

Vector can feel, even dulled by Mizael's flesh, his own energies swirling in Mizael's body, trying to reflect back into him, calling out to him like an echo. No wonder Mizael is so crazed for him right now. "Oh, Vector..." Mizael pushes up with his hands and brings his legs up around, suddenly, so that instead of lying completely prone, his legs are wrapped nearly around Vector's waist. Mizael wraps his arms around Vector's torso and presses his cheek against the gem, his expression one of ecstasy. "Burn through me," he moans, rubbing his face against it, licking it, breathing against it wetly. "Vector, fill me up with it... give me all of it... I want it... I want it..."

Vector's wings begin to buzz behind him uncontrollably.

(He loves this. He loves Mizael like this. And yet the unbreakable distance between them seems so vast—they cannot truly share light as Barians, or fuck like humans, just this uneven exchange, these bodies that can touch but never can meet.)

Mizael grinds his hips against Vector's—Vector can feel Mizael's erection against the empty, smooth expanse between his own legs. Mizael keeps rubbing his face harder and more frantically against Vector's chest, like a cat in heat. Vector nudges at his mouth with two fingers, just to see what he'd do, and Mizael grabs at his wrist, wraps his lips around Vector's fingers, heedless of the danger of his claws. He moves his lips against them as if in fellatio, his eyes hazy with lust, his legs wrapping tighter around Vector's hips and pumping harder for friction.

"Careful," Vector says, but Mizael takes his claws so easily into his throat, moaning around Vector's hand and whimpering a little as they move. (Vector wonders, has a strange and sudden moment of suspicion—is this Mizael's first time doing something like this? Really, truly?) Moments pass, Mizael on the verge of tearing his own throat open and yet managing not to, groaning, sucking, sighing, until he cries out suddenly when he finally comes, his semen darkening his pants against Vector's thigh. Vector pulls his fingers out of Mizael's mouth, trailing spit. Gross.

Mizael sighs, long, contented, face pressed into Vector's chest. "That was... nice..." he says, still dazed.

(It almost was. It could have been. Vector wonders what it would have been like if he'd shifted back to human form. Or if he'd brought Mizael immediately to Barian when he saw him, effected the transfer there, properly. Instead of standing outside like this. But if he'd—no. That would have been impossible, all of it. Utterly impossible.)

His decision is suddenly made. "Mmhm," Vector says, before reaching out, grabbing his jacket off the ground where it had been brushed aside, and ripping open a portal to Barian behind them. He clutches Mizael so that the two of them go together, and in the transfer stream he feels Mizael's light blaze up, reconfigure his body, burn off his extra energy—

They materialize exactly as they had been lying, Mizael entwined in him, only now Mizael has taken Barian form and his energies are for the most part balanced out. Durbe turns to see them. "Mizael—?! Vector, you..." Durbe looks confused. "You found him, I see."

Mizael suddenly pushes himself away from Vector, violently, pushes himself to his feet, and stalks away. Vector, bursting into a fresh round of laughter, pats Durbe on the shoulder when he stands up to go in the other direction. "Don't worry," he says. "I think Mizael learned a valuable lesson about letting things go too long before asking for help."

It's several steps later when he adds, more darkly, "You can thank me the next time he asks you first," but when he turns, Durbe is already gone.

(7:17:17 PM) **random: **also there is a moral of the story! ask for help before you get into very serious trouble  
(7:17:24 PM) **random: **and don't accept help from satan  
(7:17:29 PM) **random: **card game satan or otherwise satan  
(7:17:40 PM) **random: **it won't be the kind of help you wanted


End file.
